Half way around the other direction

Earlier this year Elena and I went on an amazing 4 month adventure around Asia visiting Thailand, Bali, Laos and Singapore. It was long planned trip and it was fabulous. As many of you know the highlight came at the end when we got engaged.

Well, I just finished booking flights for our next adventure: we’re headed to Europe for 2 months.

I made a little animated map of our route using a cool new service I found called Tripline which imports from TripIt, making it pretty easy.

Hit Play in the top right corner, enjoy the show and then let me know how the map works for you in the comments. I’m thinking I’ll do one after the face for Asia, and maybe make a “year end round up” map if it works.

The focus of this trip is to attend Terra Madre and Salon de Gusto in Torrino. Elena will be attending to represent SlowFood’s Maui chapter. Coincidentally WordCamp Europe happens a month before Salon de Gusto, so being us, we’re heading over early and combining the two events. Then while researching flights I found out that I can book American Advantage MileSAAVer award airfares into and out of Barcelona. So we’re using my 100,000 American Airlines miles. 30k miles each for the flight from SNA (Orange County) to BCN (Barcelona) and only 20k BCN to OGG (Maui). The flights from OGG to the mainland are Hawaiian and Alaska Miles. The european flights are all cash, but I found some great fares from Barcelona to Sofia, Sofia to Rome and Turin to Barcelona.

YESSSSS–I love this…really gives a sense of the world…I remember reading once that a younger generation that didn’t have much geography in school basically sees the world as a series of rooms, some which move. You take a little room on wheels to the airport, where you wait in a room until you board this room with a bunch of seats that flies somewhere–you have no idea where or how, but you end up in another room after a while, and then you take a little room on wheels…and on and on…with your moving map, we get to see the relativity of things, and over oceans, etc…I’d like to use that for my next road trip…thanks!

Very surreal. There are times I’m half way around the world and I feel like I’m just across the street at my neighbors house. Then other times I swear I’ve been transported to a different galaxy and then slipped into an alternate dimension.

Don’t get your hopes up too high, I have a long history of disappointing folks in that arena. I’m still by far the worst “travel blogger” I know. I am continually inspired by those amazing bloggers though, and am trying hard to resurrect this blog. Let’s all root for me finally succeeding in that…

When you coming to Europe? I should be here for another few weeks. Let me know if you need any tips….. Wait there was something I was supposed to tell you… Oh yes food in Rome! Right? If so book mark Pianostrada and Likeat for the best food of your life… okay well maybe the best food in Rome 😉 Green Papaya Salad on the street in Thailand is hard to compete with.

WCEU speaker submissions closed a few weeks ago, but tickets are still available. I joke that while I’ve always wanted to visit every corner of the earth, Bulgaria has definitely always been very low on my list in terms of priority. Sofia does look beautiful and I am really looking forward to seeing it. I think it’s good to get away from just going to the places at the top of our travel list every once in a while and be surprised.